Words by Jesse Serwer

If you were getting your music information from MTV in the late ’80s, you might have thought that Shinehead was the only reggae/dancehall artist out. The square Cazal aficionado was signed to Elektra Records at the time and, in the days just before Shabba Ranks’ big worldwide breakthrough, he was one of the only dancehall acts with the sort of budget that enabled him to make decent-quality videos on the regular, and actually get them played on MTV, BET and the like. Of course it helped that Shine was from New York (via Kent, England) and something of a triple threat, capable of switching from patois chatting to a falsetto croon and the accent-free MC flow of a Yankee rapper.